Social Chat is a great way to make friends, trade fish, talk about custom creations, and announce upcoming contests. However, to prevent contest announcements from becoming too annoying to your potential contest participants, here are some good guidelines to follow.

Note that these are not RULES, just GUIDELINES. We allow some leeway in breaking them, because we'd rather the community keep itself tidy than have to scan the chat logs every day with stopwatches or investigate every whistleblower who IMs us. You'd probably rather we use that time to make new content and features than play Fish Police.

This guide is simply intended to make for a friendlier, cleaner chat -- although extreme repeat offenders may be dealt with by ejection from the group (no more announcing for you!).

And now, all hail the Two Golden Guidelines to Better Contest Announcements!

1. TIME BETWEEN REPEATING ANNOUNCEMENTS. We recommend 10-15 minutes. Going down to 5 minutes is reasonable if the contest is about to begin, but in the time leading up to it, especially if the contest is an hour or more away, 15 minutes is less spammy and will very likely "catch" any newly joining fishers.

Don't feel you have to blast your message across chat every 5 minutes to make sure it's seen by all. If anything, doing that is more likely to irritate the very people you want to come to your contest -- rather counterproductive!

2. LENGTH OF ANNOUNCEMENTS. Keep your announcements short and sweet; include the information that needs to be included, maybe some hype, but don't go overboard. The more text you include, the more it pushes the chat scroll, the more it annoys fishers. Use your best judgment.

One thing we recommend against in all cases, though, is abusing forced line breaks, such as:

12:00: (7Seas Social Chat) Someguy Fishannouncer: Contest! Contest!~~~~~~~~We are startinga contest .at 2pm for300Lcome on down yothis is too many lines~~~~~~~~and the decorative lines are just space chewersI should probablyknow better.

...sooo. Yeah. An announcement like this is catchy and formatted like a paper flyer, but it also CHEWS UP space that could be used for discussion and chat. You don't need to do this just to announce your contest, so don't.

Follow these two guidelines -- not spamming chat excessively with frequent and gigantic announcements -- and your contest participants will thank you for it. Please be courteous to your fellow fishers.

From the workshop of Seven Shikami, Official 7Seas Code Monkey.For technical support please contact 7Seas Sass by IM in Second Life.